For the Balkinization symposium on Rosalind Dixon and David Landau, Abusive Constitutional Borrowing: Legal globalization and the subversion of liberal democracy (Oxford University Press, 2021).
Rosalind Dixon and David Landau
We are deeply grateful to Kim Lane Scheppele, Oren
Tamir, Sam Issacharoff, and Alvin Cheung for so generously and carefully
engaging with our work, both at an earlier event at ICON-S and in
Balkinization. We are humbled that our work is being read by such a
distinguished group of commentators, as well as by the wide-ranging discussion
our work has sparked.
The core contribution of Abusive
Constitutional Borrowing is to demonstrate the
many ways that authoritarians and would-be authoritarians can wield the core
designs, concepts, and doctrines of liberal democratic constitutionalism to
instead undermine democratic constitutionalism. The very tools used to protect
and promote democratic constitutionalism are often turned into potent weapons
to attack it. Perhaps the most important audience for our book, then, is the
comparative constitutional law community itself, as well as adjacent
communities like those found in international law and international human
rights. We intend our book as something of a warning about a dark side of our
fields, and as a call not to curtail efforts to promote liberal democratic
constitutionalism, but instead to redouble efforts in a way that is more
sensitive to the risks of abuse. For example, because many concepts intended to
promote liberal democracy can in fact be repurposed to attack it, scholars and
constitutional policymakers must be more alive to these risks. The possibility
of abuse is sometimes quite substantial. While no norm can be fully insured
against the risk of abuse, we do think that the community involved in
developing and promoting liberal democratic norms could often do a better job
of “abuse proofing” designs, concepts, and doctrines.
To substantiate our claim, we draw on examples from the heartland of liberal democracy. We devote chapters to rights and courts, perhaps its main instantiations. We show for example how courts have used militant democracy ideas to ban parties for antidemocratic ends in contexts like Cambodia and Thailand, how the Supreme Court nullified the power of an opposition-held legislature in Venezuela, and how gender quotas and hate speech norms have helped to bolster Kagame’s authoritarian regime in Rwanda. We also have a chapter on constituent power, arguably the theoretical underpinning of modern constitutionalism. Here, for example, we study the use of a doctrine of unconstitutional constitutional amendment to eliminate presidential term limits by would-be autocrats, in a line of reasoning that has run through countries such as Bolivia, Honduras, and Nicaragua in Latin America. Finally, we look at recent attempts to abuse political constitutionalism and weak forms of judicial review, ranging from Hungary and Poland in Eastern Europe to Israel.
As the prior summary suggests, and as several of the
commentators to this symposium note, we aim to draw on a wide range of contexts
to make our argument. This includes not only some of the “usual suspects” but
also a number of lesser studied cases, like Fiji, Rwanda, Cambodia, Nicaragua,
and Thailand. Of necessity, however, the universe of cases we could discuss is
limited, and many important contexts left undiscussed. We hope our book stands
in part as an invitation to future work, particularly in the many countries we
could not analyze in depth.
We agree with several of the commentators, including
Scheppele, Cheung, and Tamir, that this book tackles only part of the problem –
albeit an important part. Our book is one of several recent ones on democratic
backsliding or erosion. Although Landau’s 2013 article on “Abusive
Constitutionalism” focused on formal tools of change, we
emphasize in our book that abusive constitutional change can take many forms,
including not only the use of formal tools like amendment and replacement, but
also judicial interpretation, informal change in political practice, and the
passage of sub-constitutional laws. Cheung, in his excellent dissertation on
“Abusive Legalism” and elsewhere,
has pointed to the way that ordinary conceptions of the rule of law, like
anti-corruption crusades, public order, and tax evasion, can and are abused by
actors around the world. Our commentators rightly point out that the practice
of democratic backsliding has many facets, and all of those aspects are well
worth studying. Our aim here is not to survey the entire problem, but to focus
on one of its aspects: the ways tools of liberal democracy can be twisted into
anti-democratic weapons, often with surprising efficiency. Alongside others, we
have written about other aspects of the problem elsewhere, both jointly and
separately, and will do so again in future work.
That said, we do think the aspect we are analyzing
in Abusive Constitutional Borrowing is significant and close to the
center of the problem, not merely peripheral or epiphenomenal. Authoritarian
actors have learned to use tools of ordinary law to great effect. But the use
of liberal democratic tools to undermine democracy carries particular
dangers: tools of this kind carry a
presumptive telos or normativity that can make observers slower to notice or
call out problems of abusive use.
Why this is true is a question we begin to explore
in the book, though more work is surely needed on this topic. There are several reasons abusive tactics may
succeed in reducing the opposition of local and international observers to
anti-democratic change: local or international
actors may suffer from a form of naivety or false consciousness, or motivated
reason on the part that leads to the willing suspension of disbelief. Alternatively, international actors may have
commitments to comity and consistency, which can lead to a hesitancy to
criticize plausible instances of democratic self-government. We notice both sets of dynamics at play in
various contexts, but do not explore the full range of circumstances in which
dynamics of this kind are likely to arise.
What is clear, we suggest in the book, is that there
are moments of high constitutional law and politics where autocrats lean on
liberal democratic constitutionalism to carry out important regime goals, and
in the process effectively wreck significant, antidemocratic transformations.
In Cambodia, for instance, the high court’s decision to ban the opposition
Rescue Party in 2017 by abusing militant democracy tools was no mere blip – it
effectively eliminated the only opposition, which had nearly won control of
Parliament in a shocking 2013 result. In the next election, the ruling party
won all parliamentary seats, and a potential democratization effort was
stymied. In several countries in Latin America, a bogus “right” to presidential
reelection, distorted from both constitutional and human rights law, was
wielded alongside doctrines like the unconstitutional constitutional amendment
doctrine to allow presidents to remain in power indefinitely. Some, like Daniel
Ortega in Nicaragua, remain there to this day, ruling over an increasingly
authoritarian regime. In Venezuela, the Supreme Court, and then a sham-like
Constituent Assembly, were the main tools used to repress the
opposition-controlled Congress after the opposition won around two-thirds of
the seats in 2015. Thus, the opposition
was denied any of the voice that it was able to win (with great difficulty) in
the election, and a key counterbalance to the autocratic Nicholas Maduro was
nullified. In Rwanda, hate speech laws have been used to imprison key
opposition leaders, thus fending off potential challenges to Kagame. And the
list goes on.
One of the goals of our book has been to develop a clear
definition of “abuse.” As scholars such as Tamir suggest, there is a risk that
the label of “abusive constitutionalism” may itself be abused, essentially used
to delegitimize anything a commentator doesn’t like. For this reason, we tie
our definition of abuse to intentional action that undermines a relatively thin
definition of democracy focusing on the fairness of the electoral process. This
kind of definition is well-known in political science, and also apparent in
some recent work in law, such as Ginsburg and Huq’s How
to Save a Constitutional Democracy. Even such a
minimalist definition – which we call the democratic minimum core – cannot be
too thin. Of necessity, it includes commitment to at least a core set of rights
necessary for holding elections on a level playing field; so too a commitment
to the basic rule of law. There are many ways for modern elections to be
rigged, and sophisticated actors often do their work well before the election,
leveraging their control of institutions like the media and the courts. But a
narrower definition is helpful in providing a relatively clear yardstick for
abuse. So too, it ties abuse to values that autocrats themselves pay lip
service to honoring. Many would-be autocrats seem to follow Hungary’s Viktor
Orban in attacking “liberalism” as a “western” imposition, but most still claim
to be democrats.
Tamir disputes our interpretation of the Israeli
case, suggesting that we may be overstating the threat that Benjamin Netanyahu,
and in particular his allies’ proposal for a broad Knesset override of judicial
decisions, may have posed to constitutional democracy. The cases in our book
lie on a spectrum, and we have tried to be careful in describing “close” versus
“clear cases. Some involve mainly threats to liberal values, where the threat
to democracy is less clear. That is the case with the movement of “memory laws”
to contexts like Poland and Russia. Others involve more disputed threats to
democracy – the consistent judicial banning of Thaksin and his allies in
Thailand, for instance, is murky despite ending in a military coup, because
Thaksin himself posed plausible threats to democracy.
Yet we still characterize Israel as an act of
“attempted” abusive constitutional borrowing. The threat to democracy may not
have been as severe as that found in some other contexts in the book. And the
threat of course did not stem from the mere consideration of a Canadian-style
override in Israel – as we emphasize, there have been several proposals over
time, and some of them were based on good-faith discussion of constitutional
roles. Several things seem to us to set the most recent effort of Netanyahu
apart. The first is a general context in which some scholars – not all, as
Tamir emphasizes – have sounded alarms about a series of moves that seemed to
undermine Israeli democracy. The second is that the most obvious aim of the
move was to insulate a bill that in turn would have given Netanyahu immunity
from prosecution for an ongoing criminal corruption trial, which seems to us to
go close to the heart of the fairness of the electoral process. Netanyahu is,
as Tamir notes, no longer in power, at least for the moment. We would note,
however, that would-be autocrats are sometimes more dangerous upon a return to
power – witness Orban. And even if Israel escapes significant danger to its democratic
order, it still may be what Ginsburg and Huq have called a “near
miss.”
More generally, Tamir raises a concern, also
emphasized by Mark
Tushnet elsewhere, that we may be developing our
characterization on too thin a record – a universe of relatively cosmopolitan,
English-speaking scholars who see only one side of a dispute. We recognize the
concern and take this critique seriously. In some cases, we were able to
diffuse it by relying on deep knowledge of individual contexts and the use of
primary sources – this is likely true, for instance, of Landau’s knowledge of
contexts like Venezuela and Ecuador in Latin America. We do not, of course,
have that knowledge for every case studied in the book. But in each case, we
tried to rely on a multiplicity of scholars, and ones with a variety of
perspectives. In analyzing Poland, for example, we relied not only on scholars
like Wojciech Sadurski who have written knowledgeable texts critiquing the
regime, but also those like Adam Czarnota who have developed a more qualified take
on the dangers to democracy posed by recent changes in Poland.
Scheppele raises a different concern with our
yardstick of abuse – she argues that it may be too narrow and thus too open to
manipulation by would-be autocrats. Of course, we agree with Scheppele that a list-like
approach is completely inadequate, for the reasons she has
identified. Analyzing the degradation of the democratic minimum core is
difficult and requires close attention to constitutional and sub-constitutional
changes in a particular context. Some of our recommendations for reform in fact
fall along these lines, as we call for a more legal realist, and more holistic,
response from transnational and international audiences and institutions to the
threat posed by abusive constitutional borrowing. But we also think that a minimal conception
of democracy, one focused on the electoral sphere, is the right yardstick. A
broader one, as we have noted, risks undermining moral and analytic clarity
about the meaning of the core concept of abuse. And it may freeze the kind of
experimentation – not mimicry, but experimentation – that is necessary to
rejuvenate liberal democratic constitutions.
Finally, Scheppele argues that “borrowing” may not
be the right term for the phenomenon we describe. She prefers “migration.” We
disagree. Borrowing (like migration) is a metaphor, and imperfectly captures
the idea of liberal democratic (mis)appropriation we have in mind. But migration
in particular underplays the agency involved in the process. Ideas do not
simply make their way to new contexts. They are appropriated by authoritarians,
who draw on them as inspiration and/or justification for anti-democratic moves.
Virtually all legal borrowing involves mutation in the norms being borrowed.
The difference with abusive forms of borrowing is that they carry out these
mutations – for instance, selectivity in what is being borrowed, or
transplantation to a new context where the norm works differently – precisely
to maximize antidemocratic impact. And
they do so in ways that trade off both continuities and discontinuities between
old and new uses and contexts.
We once again which to express our gratitude towards
our commentators for their generous and thoughtful comments. We hope we have
helped to spark a conversation about the many ways in which liberal democratic
norms can be abused to attack democracy and the role that the public law
community might play in facilitating or stopping that abuse.
Rosalind Dixon is Professor of Law at the University of New South Wales, Faculty of Law. You can reach her by e-mail at rosalind.dixon@unsw.edu.au.
David Landau is Mason Ladd Professor & Associate Dean for International Programs at Florida State University. You can reach him by e-mail at dlandau@law.fsu.edu.